Bosque is dying. I am not.

… … …

His hands on my neck, gripping too tight for my comfort, they remind me of how defeated he always is. Bosque is defeated through smiles and through conversations and through moments of love and lust and sorrow. Bosque sits around with his heart turning to wood, his horns turning to wood, his mouth turning to wood. We fuck through a lot of it, me enjoying the hardness of him, him dying from it.

The Earth is eating Bosque. It’s what he’s supposed to go through. It’s what he watched his mother go through, his sisters and brothers and uncles. They all turned to wood. He accepted his destiny as a child and that was that. But then we met.

And now he just wants to be alive, too.

And now he just wishes he was what I am.

…

My father is a Boar. My uncles are all Boars. My Mother is the product of more Boars and they all make up the strongest of DNA. Lots of other girls come from families full of Boars and Primes. And yet so many Horn Girls get sick anyway. So many of those same Boars, creating stronger and stronger creatures, end up sick with Horn Rot or Transparent Horn or any other number of diseases. I come from the only family in this entire country that has a clean bloodline. We’re all well. The women are all Primes, the men are all Boars, and we are all destined to continue a clean line of Horns.

It’s not likely that Bosque would outlive me. It’s not even likely that he’ll live with me long enough for me to understand him. But we met. And so we’ll try.

I guess we’ll try.

… … …

It’s a love-hate thing. It’s a thing where some days, I wake up covered in the dirt of him. And I feel it staining my flesh, sinking into me, and I’m disgusted. I want to clean myself with acid. It’s a thing where I wake up sometimes, Bosque’s hand clenched so deep in me that I passed out, that my eyes rolled up and my tongue hung out and I just stopped breathing. He’s so full of rage that he fingers me until my teeth feel like they’re going to break from clenching, that he pushes inside me like I’m made of metal and not flesh. Sometimes I wake up like that and I push my tongue into his mouth and taste all that wood and dirt and I can’t stop cumming. I can’t get enough of him.

Sometimes, he calls me when he’s in the middle of one of his fits, when the vines are moving too close to his lungs and he’s panicking. And he sobs to me. And I want to throw up from how pathetic he is.

My family is so against the idea of him, the existence of him, that I have to pretend he’s dead already. So my father doesn’t find him and murder him. So my mother doesn’t set him and all that wood on fire.

He is sick. I am not.

… … …

Bosque lives alone surrounded by concrete. He grows his lung flowers and teeth vines and sucks in smaller and smaller breaths on the outskirts of our society. They don’t like him here. They like him less than the Rots. They like him less than the clear horns. They like him less.

But I will always love him. Through disgust. Through lust. Through my stone face, I will love him until he is devoured by the Earth and I’m visiting a tree and not a man. And maybe, if I’m as wonderful as he thinks I am, maybe I’ll spare him that indignity. Spare myself that pain.

He is hopeless. I am not.